Todos los capítulos de After the Alpha Rejected Me, I Came Back with His Twins: Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

The two post pages were resealed and removed from the outer table at first light. Bram and Tess were no longer part of the morning's work. On the eighteenth, at a quarter past seven, I ruled four empty headings.LAST SEEN. TAKEN OFF. RECEIVED BY. STATUS.I left the fourth blank — not dead, alive, held, or escaped.Ames brought only the narrow ordinary receipt and guard indexes from after the twenty-first. Every restricted file stayed locked elsewhere, outside Damien's sight. He waited at the field gate because his recorded personal sight followed Sedge as far as the water, not because he belonged to this investigation.What lay on the wood was blank paper, those narrow indexes, and a line I had copied out in my own hand.THE BOOK WENT OUT OF SEDGE'S HANDS AND INTO THE WATER, AND HE WENT AFTER IT.Under it: DAMIEN KANE. PERSONAL SIGHT, TWENTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER.A clause came after that in his own telling, about what the thing told you concerning the man. I left it off. It is a judgment

At half past one Theo came up from the lower yard and asked which end of the table he was wanted at."This one. It is the twenty-first of December," I said. "Your own hours of it and nothing else. You will not be told why I am asking, and you will not be told what any other wolf has said."Ames entered the hour, the porch, the four of us and the exact width of the questions, and read that width aloud before I put one. The four columns lay face down under a stone at the far end of the boards with the certified extract folded inside them, and stayed there all afternoon."From the moment you turned toward the water," I said. "Forward from that. What you did, and what your own eyes held."He sat back. "Somebody has put me on that meadow.""Somebody has. You will not get a name off me for it.""I don't want one. I was there. Ask.""How near did you come to the break.""To the edge of it. The landward lip." He said it the way he says a depth off a bar. "The ring lamps were dead before I got

They came back separately, which was the whole point of asking separately.The samples arrived first, at one, in a card folder with its own number inked on the flap and its own handover page tied to it. Ames read the number aloud, checked it against the receipt spiked on his nail that morning, and set the folder at the left end of the table.The duty line came up a quarter of an hour later, carried by a different wolf on a different errand. Inside its sleeve was a certified extract of that one entry, checked against its source and authenticated under its ordinary chain, with a separate number and handover page. That went to the right end of the table, four feet of bare board between it and the folder, and Ames put a weight on the sleeve without opening it.Neither carrier was told what the other had brought. Neither asked. Both signed, took their halves, and went back down."Both hands and hours against both," Ames said. "Nothing has been opened, and they have not been set together in

The sequence extract came up at two on the afternoon of the twentieth, and the first thing I understood about it was that no line on it carried an hour."Short chain," Mara said."Located this morning against the number we sent down at twenty past ten, certified against its source, signed out to me at half past one." Ames squared it to the table edge. "One desk, one date, one category. The run, and nothing standing behind it."Mara wrote the permission in under a minute, because by now our hands know where they go: read the intake sequence for that desk and that date, find where Theo's return sits in it, read nothing else. Then the shut list in her own voice, out loud, as it goes every morning.The page did one job: a running number down the left margin, a word for the category, a short word for the item, all the way down, and nothing else.Theo's task number sat about a third of the way into the run, a line above it and a line below it.I kept my hand well clear of it."Say what it d

The word came up the stair at twenty past nine on the morning of the twenty-second, and the wolf who brought it had been told to keep it short, so he did."There's a wolf at the front door."Mara had the press open and yesterday's wrapper in her hands, and put it down without shutting the lid."Asking for what.""Asking for the Elder. By the notice." He was young and he had run up two flights and was working hard at not asking the questions in his face. "He says he was told to come in daylight with his hands empty and he'd like somebody to come out and look at him."I did not run. Whatever was coming up that road deserved to be met by somebody walking."Ames," I said. "Pencil. Both guards stay where they are, and nobody speaks to him before I do.""Your sons are at my house," Mara said, already moving."With Ronan on the step. I know."The Pack House front door gives onto twenty yards of open gravel. He stood at the far edge of it with his hands empty, which the notice had asked for,